Unbalanced Checks

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the hot button movie du jour. Less than a week
after opening in the U.S., it's already the highest grossing documentary
of all time, besting Moore's last effort, Bowling for Columbine. It won
the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (a case of politics
trumping art, obviously, but still a notable achievement). Critically,
for Moore, Fahrenheit 9/11 is causing exactly the type of furor he'd
hoped for. Love him or hate him, Moore knows how to push peoples'
buttons and let the court of public opinion sound off on issues he
raises.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is an unapologetically agenda-driven film, which is
as it should be: save for nature films, few documentaries are completely
objective, and Moore makes no bones about his subjective point of view.
Indeed, there's no real way to approach the film's subject matter
objectively. It's an election year, and American troops are occupying
foreign soil. For the liberal-with-a-capital-L Moore, who passionately
believes Democratic leadership has failed to take a stand against
President Bush and his Republican administration, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a
full frontal assault on what the director views as a crooked, greedy and
negligent Commander in Chief who has led this country into a war few
want (save for the Military Industrial Complex Bush and his associates
have disturbingly close ties with), and being asleep at the wheel when
Osama bin Laden attacked the country on September 11.

Moore is an irreducibly polarizing figure; it's difficult to have an
indifferent opinion about the man or his work. What's refreshing about
his approach to Fahrenheit 9/11 is how little he appears on
camera. There's no badgering of GM chairman Roger Smith or
NRA president
Charlton Heston here. The closest Moore gets to harassment is when he
attempts to hijack members of congress on their way to work and request
that they sign their children up for duty in Iraq (apparently, only one
member of Congress has offspring serving active duty). Moore strives
mightily to entertain (the pop music is queued at appropriate moments,
the most amusing being "Greatest American Hero" blaring while President
Bush boards an aircraft carrier for his embarrassingly premature
"Mission Accomplished" speech), and he doesn't miss an opportunity to
present Bush as a dimwitted boob via carefully chosen and edited
footage. The lack of Moore's substantial physical presence helps keep
the focus on the key issues: The war in Iraq and the price the country
has paid (and is still paying) for its involvement in the conflict.

Fahrenheit 9/11 works best when Moore sticks to Bush and his
reasons for going to war: Oil, oil, and oil. The notion that the
president wanted to deflect from his failure to capture Osama bin Laden
by going after a far more accessible target -- Saddam Hussein -- is also
argued, though Moore's attempt at connecting the Bush and bin Laden
families contains no compelling smoking gun. The idea of two wealthy
families aligning is hardly revelatory, and the fact that a few of
Osama's relatives attended his son's wedding in Afghanistan is hardly
evidence of Bush having a bias for the world's most wanted terrorist.
The point that members of the Saudi and bin Laden families were allowed
to travel after 9/11, despite the grounding of all commercial flights is
thin, as well. Rich people with influence in government operate by a
different set of rules, and it's been clearly documented that the
departure of Osama's relatives took place after commercial flights were
cleared to resume flying. But such facts don't jibe with Moore's
program, so they're overlooked.

Moore hits his mark examining the war's toll on American families,
and the businesses in this country (Halliburton being the most egregious)
eager for the conflict to go on as long as possible so they can profit
from the immediate contracts and long-term infrastructure needs. It's
fairly obvious the war in Iraq did not have to happen; there was simply
no immediate threat to the United States or its allies from Saddam
Hussein and his admittedly ruthless regime. If there is any backlash
against President Bush in November (aside from the economy, stupid), it
will arise from resentment that we conquered a country we had no
business invading in the first place.

It would have been nice if Moore had pointed out the larger issue of
Bush's rush to war: Namely the complicity of the Republican-controlled
Congress. Moore singles out Bush as the prime mover, which is
undoubtedly valid, but gives little mention of the fact that whenever
Republicans or Democrats have a majority in Congress and control the
Oval Office as well, a particular agenda will be pushed through, be it
welfare or war. Without checks and balances -- the fundamental criteria
for a democratic society -- abuses are inevitable. Absolute power is a
seductively powerful corrupter of even the noblest civil servants. Bush
is the too-easy target, but the mess the country finds itself in stems
from a larger trend of one party out-campaigning the other to the point
that a fair and balanced government body has been knocked dangerously
askew.